Male Sex Work and Society Read Online Free PDF

Idaho, with a population of approximately 50,000 in the 1950s, had a male street hustling scene then, made up mostly of “delinquent” youth.

     
    FIGURE 2.2
    Cover of City of Night , John Rechy’s groundbreaking novel about male sex work.
     
    The ascendancy of the sexological ideology of homosexuality dramatically accelerated with the rise of “gay liberation.” By the late 1960s and early 1970s, gay writers were forcefully questioning the “straightness” of any man who had sex of any sort with another man. “As for the hustler,” wrote one observer, “most gays look down upon him for maintaining that he’s really straight” (Hunt, 1977, p. 136). The rise of gay liberation made it still more difficult for men to engage in same-sex sexual relations without being forced to take on the onus of the homosexual identification. The older paradigm in which working-class men experienced sexual pleasure with “fairy” men and maintained their normative status became virtually untenable with the increasing visibility of gay life. Most male street prostitutes came to occupy only very marginal spaces within the gay social world and did not generally participate in the gay political struggle. Quite the contrary, street hustlers often felt quite hostile to gay liberation, seeing in it a movement that excluded them and their concerns.
    Yet, if the ideology of homosexuality brought difficult personal challenges for some hustlers, for others the rise of gay liberation led toward an increasing acceptance of gay or bisexual self-identity. One of the first openly gay authors of this period was, in fact, a formerly straight-identified hustler who wrote more or less autobiographically of his life. John Rechy’s first book, City of Night (1963), remained on bestseller lists for months and is now considered a gay classic. It precisely documented the central character’s confrontation with his own inclinations toward homosexuality. Ironically, many of those who worked on the street were unable to claim their gay status openly as their gay clientele still frequently preferred straight “trade.” “I have on occasion made a definite statement [proclaiming myself gay],” wrote Rechy, “and the person has lost interest in me” (1978/1974, p. 266).
    Although a preference for straight (or semistraight) trade was manifest on the streets in the late 1960s, other sexual markets began to open up in which the clients displayed no such tendency. Gay men began selling sex to one another in much larger numbers, mostly working off the street through escort agencies and ads. Although some gay clients had sought gay workers before the 1970s, the gay liberation era marked the first time that most gay men began to buy sex from other gay men, rather than from straight outsiders who lived the bulk of their lives outside the gay world. The new relationship between client and prostitute produced new sexual practices. Clients in the late 19 th century had only sought to act as “tops” with youths, but gay men could now pay to take a “dominant” role with adult men. Clients calling agencies often sought much more than to give oral satisfaction to the hustler, seeking “versatile” partners whom they could anally penetrate, workers willing to participate in three-ways with another worker, or others who would help create sexual fantasy scenes via costumes. The resulting possibilities transformed the work dynamics even for those on the street who sought to continue in the prior, “inserter-only” modality, as greater pressure was placed on them to perform a greater variety of sexual acts.
    The shifts in male prostitution associated with gay liberation led to a significant reworking of the meanings associated with prostitution. Although the act represented a simple means of supplementing one’s income or allowance for a previous generation of “delinquents,” for the first time it became a possible means of affirming one’s sexual identity.